Jens Pulver reinvents himself

http://mmajunkie.comComing off a loss in what arguably could be the most important match of his long career, Jens Pulver is embarking on an experiment.

A few weeks before his 34th birthday, the first-ever Ultimate Fighting Championship lightweight champion, whose style has largely been sprawl-and-brawl, is looking to reinvent himself – as a technician.

He said you probably won’t see any major changes in his fight on Wednesday night, when he faces Leonard Garcia in the semi-main event on the World Extreme Cagefighting show, which airs live on Versus, from the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Fla. But after four weeks of a new training regime, Pulver feels he’s on his way.

Wednesday’s show will be headlined by featherweight champion Urijah Faber, to whom Pulver lost a five-round decision on May 31 and who is the No. 5 ranked pound-for-pound fighter in the Yahoo! Sports rankings. Faber will be defending his title against local product Mike Brown. The show is expected to sell out, as only a few hundred tickets were available at press time.

But after his loss to Faber, Pulver realized what many critics had said: that the sport had evolved while he had stayed the same.

Pulver recognized he would have to change his game to be a threat to the championship.

“The idea is to become a threat from every position,” said Pulver. “I’ve had to evolve. Before, I would be afraid to throw a kick because I didn’t want to get taken down. When I was in a bad position, I would have to scramble to get into a better position. The idea is no matter where the fight goes, to be a threat from that position.”

He moved his training from the Miletich Gym in his home of Davenport, Iowa, to Matt Hume’s AMC-Pankration Gym in Seattle. It meant a return to the city he grew up in, but that has far more bad memories than good, of a childhood where he went to bed every night fearing for his safety. He grew up with a father who routinely beat him and his mother, and his brother was in and out of jail.

Pulver has been a name fighter for nearly a decade, and was the first UFC lightweight champion in 2001. Garcia, 31, was virtually unknown until an April 7, 2007, loss to Roger Huerta.

But Pulver and Garcia actually started their careers in similar fashion, one week apart, in 1999. Garcia was in a tournament, which he didn’t win, in Amarillo, Texas. Pulver was in a tournament that he also didn’t win, in Denver, although at that point he was primarily a wrestler.

It was at Pulver’s second tournament six weeks later, where he was told that John Perretti, the UFC matchmaker at the time, was in attendance. Bas Rutten told him to go out and throw punches because that would impress Perretti. He knocked out teenager Joe Stevenson in 38 seconds, then submitted Ray Morales in 51 seconds, and Perretti brought him into the UFC in the company’s first-ever lightweight fight on Sept. 24, 1999, where he drew with Alfonso Alcarez.

But it’s a completely different sport now.

“In those days, you had strikers and grapplers,” he said. “The idea was to make the grapplers stand up or take the strikers to the ground. I could wrestle and I could box. Those were two things in a day when most fighters were one-dimensional. Today, you’ve got guys with great Muay Thai who are black belts in Jiu Jitsu.”

He was talked into making the move by manager Monte Cox, as well as Rich Franklin and Spencer Fisher. When he got to Seattle, he was exposed to a completely different type of training. Gone were the endless sets of bench presses and squats. Every morning, he does a series of unique exercises with drills working both strength and endurance from every position, while being hooked up to a heart monitor. The idea is to work functional strength and endurance from every angle that you would be in during a fight. Pulver noted he’s put on new muscle in different parts of his body and, for the first time, may have to work at making weight.

He’s only had a month of this new system, so he’s not predicting he’ll be a new fighter.

“Matt Hume tested me out and told me I’m at 40 percent of my ability, and I have to get to 90 percent,” he said, recognizing that he was simply not fast enough or varied enough, even at his best, to beat Faber, which would be the ultimate goal. “I fought B.J. Penn, the lightweight champion, for two rounds and fought Faber for five rounds at 40 percent of my ability. I can’t wait until a year from now.”

Garcia, 11-3, is coming off problems of his own. Garcia made his name in the UFC as a lightweight in a three-round decision loss to Huerta in one of last year’s best fights. But since he was a small lightweight, after a loss to Cole Miller five months later, he was asked to move to featherweight and the WEC. He debuted in his new weight class on Feb. 13, knocking out Hiroyuki Takaya in just 1:31.

“He’s very, very tough,” said Pulver. “Knocking out Takaya was impressive and he’s a big 145-pounder.”

But after that win, not only was Garcia’s career threatened, but also his entire future. He was arrested on charges of being part of a large cocaine ring in the Southwest. The federal charges have since been dropped. Garcia said he made the mistake of hanging around with he wrong people, but that he was not involved in the trafficking. This will be his first fight since the ordeal.

Pulver is 22-9-1 overall, but is 8-1 as a featherweight, as he’s fought most of his career against much bigger opponents. Pulver biggest national exposure was last summer as an “Ultimate Fighter” coach, where he opposed Penn to build for a match. In what was the biggest lightweight fight of the early era of UFC, Pulver won a five-round decision over a heavily-favored Penn to keep the title in 2002. Then Pulver left UFC after a contract dispute.

If Pulver has one last business goal, it’s to be in the first featherweight fight where the participants get six figures. It stems back to 2002, when he left UFC as champion. UFC was losing money and the company wouldn’t match the $50,000 offer he got from Japan, even though UFC had several heavyweights who were not champions making substantially more. He was told that it’s just the way it is – that the heavyweights in the sport are going to get the biggest money.

Pulver got $40,500 for the match with Faber, while the champion received $51,500, a far cry from some six- and seven-figure numbers the stars in the heavier weight classes have earned this year.

But he can look back at history as being the guy who started the lightweight division, and in a completely different era, was involved in the fight that really put the spotlight on the featherweight division. The Pulver-Faber match drew a near sellout 12,682 fans to Arco Arena in Sacramento, the third largest non-UFC crowd for an MMA event in North American history. It also drew a 1.44 rating, one of the largest in the history of the Versus network.

“We showed (with the Faber fight) that you don’t need to have the big guys on the show to draw,” he said. “Two featherweights, with two 135-pounders as the other main event, did the same kind of numbers as the Stanley Cup.”

Dave Meltzer covers mixed martial arts for Yahoo! Sports. This story originally appeared on Yahoo! Sports and is syndicated on MMAjunkie.com as part of a content-partnership deal between the two sites.